Journey to Becoming Debt Free
Overcoming An overwhelming surplus of student loan debt
Like so many other millennials, my husband and I have an overwhelming amount of student loan debt and neither one of us are a doctor or a lawyer. So many times, he and I feel suffocated by the thought of tackling our student loans; it’s like where do we start? One thing I am loving about this generation, is our candid nature in regards to discussing money. I spent the first part of my life living in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. When I was 11 years old, my family moved to United States as an economic migrants. The economic collapse that crippled Zimbabwe is one of the greatest economic disasters of the 21st Century. My parents lost everything; from retirement, pension, to stocks and bonds. I will never be able to fully comprehend the great sacrifice they made as they left everything they had worked so hard for behind to transition to the United States and start over. Because we are migrants to the United States, we were starting from way below zero in regards to finances, building equity and wealth, and understanding how to make it in a new financial system that was greatly different from what we were familiar with. The same applies to my Jamaican husband. His family migrated to the United States when he was 15 years old and so as far as many knowledge, he and I had absolutely none. There was no money talk in my household growing up. I didn’t have those money saving value circumstantially. Scroll down for more...
Great financial resources
I started my career as a nurse when I was 21 years old. I knew absolutely nothing about investing, 401K, Roth IRA, traditional IRA, or even saving. Everything I had known about my life till then was living hand to mouth. So I did not quite know what to do with my small surplus of extra cash. When I started my career in Walla Walla, WA, I was earning about $25 per hour as a new graduate bachelor’s prepared registered nurse. In comparison to Portland OR, it was $10-$12 shy of my counterparts but I was in rural Washington state after all. For the two years that I worked there, I did not contribute to my retirement at all nor contribute to any saving account. And because I was there for only two years, I was not vested with my retirement funds so whatever the hospital contributed to my retirement, was lost. I did not quite care back then, but my oldest brother had learned how to navigate the American financial system quite efficiently. He always impressed upon me the idea of saving my money, not overspending, creating a monthly budget, and also figuring out a way to creatively pay back my student loans. Furthermore, my mom did life from zero to 100, TWICE. She came from little and became something amazing early in her life, and when the economy crashed, she pivoted. She put her ego aside and with incredible humility had very little all over again only to become something amazing, again. She is such a great example to me that hard work, determination, patience, absolute faith, and persistence will get you what you desire from life.
Moving to Connecticut, going to grad school, getting married, and being with a single company for the last 5 years has helped shape my financial mindset for the better. I am now learning to be a better steward of my finances. I contribute to my retirement, I have savings, I am investing in an extra savings for retirement, and I am learning more about investing in stocks, mutual funds, and bonds. This did not happen by mistake. I have intentionally surrounded myself with like minded people who have similar goals of becoming debt free, retiring early, and creating generational wealth.
Moving forward, my husband and I have committed ourselves to weaving our finances together in a systematic and productive way. We certainly believe in having her own accounts but have seen a huge benefit in a joint account for savings going forward. Furthermore we have discovered an integrated app that keeps our budget in order. We are able to see our combined spending monthly and analyze it to see how and where our money is going and how we can we appropriate funds to pay down debt instead. The long and short is, we are on a modified version of Dave Ramsey's baby steps to becoming debt free. We have a $1000 emergency fund, then we pay non-negotiables like rent, water, electricity, gas, and then attack our debts smallest to largest. So far, we are still working on chipping away steadily at our small debts and working our way up to our bigger debts.
This road to becoming debt free is long, hard, and lonely. I struggle wholeheartedly with discipline in most capacities. I do a lot of beating myself up when I fail and I am learning to be more patient and gracious. Do you have resources that you have found helpful along debt free journey? Please comment down below as sharing is caring. If you have made it here, kudos to you. I will be back with much more on this journey to becoming debt free. Until next time, big bisous!
